Al, We Hardly Know Ye

[from the March 1, 2004 issue]

The evolution of the character invented by the media to play the role "Al Gore" will one day make a remarkable doctoral dissertation. The most doctrinaire postmodernist would have a hard time keeping up with the myriad literary inventions, textual subversions and convenient fictions necessary to sustain the ever-changing narrative. One day Gore is an uptight, hypercautious "serial exaggerator." Later, when it turns out that it was the media--most egregiously, the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly--who spread false stories about Gore that were picked up and trumpeted on cable TV and talk-radio, he is recast as a radical wild man, sporting a frightening beard and spouting dangerous left-wing nostrums.

In a New York Times story titled "An Endorsement From Gore Became a Dubious Prize," Elisabeth Bumiller gives us the newest version, asking, "Is an endorsement from Al Gore the kiss of political death?" She cites observations made by Bob Dole on Larry King Live along with an anonymous "friend" of Gore. The story line is now set in stone: The Dean endorsement proved the final dot in the ideological rebranding of Al Gore from centrist Democrat to left-wing Democrat. You can almost hear the tongues clucking at Ben and Sally's.

I've got a bias here. I never liked Gore when I was beating up Naderites who thought it'd be fun to throw the election to George W. Bush. I had heard he could be charming in private--funny, self-effacing and intellectually inquisitive--but I never knew anyone who claimed to have personally seen this. And the fact that the only one outside his immediate family who seemed passionate about his presidential candidacy was Marty Peretz didn't help.

But in the past year I've watched Gore, freed from the burden of office-holding, finally finding the authentic voice that appeared to elude him for much of his political career. It began with his brave and early denunciations of the Bush Administration's war-planning, picked up steam with his attacks on its deceptions that enabled the war effort and manifested itself again with a recent speech on its AWOL attitude on global warming. Gore summed it all up over the weekend of February 5-7 in a speech at a New School University conference on "Uses and Misuses of Fear" in our political system, sponsored by the journal Social Research, and at a rally of Tennessee Democrats in Nashville, where he was joined by Wes Clark and John Edwards. He gave roughly the same speech to the rednecks and the pointy-heads.

At the New School conference, I was amazed at Gore's courage in calling the President to task for his (undeniable) manipulation of Americans' fear of terrorism and also at Gore's willingness to apply the same unflinching analysis to Bush's economic policies, environmental policies and abuse of civil liberties. And he didn't stop there. Gore took the further step to ask, systemically, just what was allowing these egregious abuses of power and trust to take place: "How could our precious nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics?" His response:

What happened? For one thing there's been a dramatic change in the nature of what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has described as the structure of the public forum--the way our political discourse takes place. It no longer operates as it once did. It is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

Leaving aside the question of whether any nominee for President of the United States has ever before seen fit to quote a Frankfurt School philosopher, these are brave words for any mainstream politician. With nothing to gain and much to lose should he want to continue his career in public life someday, Gore is taking on the entire media structure that makes it so difficult for his increasingly complex critique of the Administration's policies to be heard. It's not only their fault for lying to us; it's everybody's fault for letting them get away with it.

Gore's presentation was impressive on many levels. He had clearly read a number of the papers to be given later at the conference and spoke perceptively about the physiological effects of fear on the cognitive processes and the ease with which these can be manipulated by advertisers and politicians alike. He admitted his own (relative) ignorance about many of the topics about which he had been reading but still managed to weave them into a coherent critique not only of how awful the Bush Administration is but how attenuated the muscles of our democratic body politic have grown, allowing Bush to get away with so much.

It is hardly any wonder that mainstream media mavens would react negatively to Gore's newfound self-confidence coupled with his uncompromised criticism of their willful self-delusion about the current Administration, the war and so much else. Even New School president (and Gore's former Senate colleague) Bob Kerrey didn't seem to get it, when he tried, after Gore's talk, to equate Democrats' manipulation of Republican untrustworthiness on Medicare and Social Security with Bush & Co.'s deliberate use of deception to fool Americans into an unnecessary, counterproductive war.

At the post-speech dinner, Gore took questions and demonstrated that self-effacing charm and penetrating intelligence I had heard about, admitting that he'd try to "bullshit" his way through the "essay question" I asked him and later demonstrating the technique he developed during his teenage years for hypnotizing chickens. His combination of brains and bravery--even in the face of his grave miscalculation regarding Dean--when viewed against the smug, shallow self-satisfaction of the media bigfeet who mock him, redounds enormously to Gore's benefit. When you compare him to the current occupant of the Oval Office and consider the nefarious manner by which he got there, it is more than enough to inspire despair about the state of our country, its unhappy immediate past and its profoundly frightening future.

What happened? For one thing there's been a dramatic change in the nature of what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has described as the structure of the public forum--the way our political discourse takes place. It no longer operates as it once did. It is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

What happened? The internet. Now Gore's "authentic voice" can be vetted by the people, by themselves, and dissected to show his flip-flops and hypocrisy, foremostly about Iraq.

It is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

Given that this appears on a website whose politics are anathema to Mr. Alterman in the first place, offered for comment, and will generate numerous replies from all over the world, I would classify this statement as quite the silliest and most blatantly mistaken thing I've read in a long time. I know that Gore made it, but Alterman repeated it. It is simply factually incorrect.

Political discourse has never been more widespread or accessible to the general public, never. There are, to be sure, those who have difficulties with the way things used to be, notably professional scribes such as Mr. Alterman, whose monopoly is long over. Tough.

Gore summed it all up over the weekend of February 5-7 in a speech at a New School University conference on "Uses and Misuses of Fear" in our political system

This coming from a man who was the chief candidate for a political party who's favorite tactics involve reckless racism charges, lies about the environment, trumped up non-scandals (Bush AWOL), and is joined at the hip with tort lawyers whose sole purpose in life is to scare naive jurors and with a news media which specializes in scaring people on a daily basis, often of imaginary things.

7
posted on 02/17/2004 3:37:27 PM PST
by GulliverSwift
(Keep the <a href="http://www.johnkerry.com/">gigolo</a> out of the White House!)

...The most doctrinaire postmodernist would have a hard time keeping up with the myriad literary inventions, textual subversions and convenient fictions necessary to sustain the ever-changing narrative...

Speaking of postmodernism and Algore, it's been noted by Lyotard that "class is fundamentally dead". Thus, Marx promotes the use of subdialectic textual theory to challenge capitalism. Derrida uses the term 'Marxist capitalism' to denote the role of the artist as participant.

In the works of Burroughs, a predominant concept is the concept of preconceptualist narrativity. But Baudrillard's critique of capitalist deconstructivism states that culture is capable of intentionality. Any number of discourses concerning Marxist capitalism may be found in Algore's closet.

Well the Elitists never had problems before maintaining their "vigorous and free exchange of ideas" until the common vulgar masses got involved with their internet and their talk radio. (/patrician sneer)

17
posted on 02/17/2004 3:56:57 PM PST
by stands2reason
(DU lurkers: stick around, you may just grow a brain.)

"How could our precious nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics?"

He should try looking at the 8 years he spent manipulating our politics so that we didn't see that the Clinton response to terrorism was ineffective, ill conceived and out of proportion to the risk. Perhaps a more communicative and serious administration would have not have left the nation so painfully vulnerable.

I'm glad the dem pundits such as Alterman enjoy showing off their intellectual abilities. It loses so many of the people they need to reach. If he keeps this up, the dem minions and the independents will scratch their heads and ask: What the heck is this guy talking about?

Alterman and the elitist dem leadership are no great communicators. As a result, they will lose because they will never influence the majority of voters.

School, of course, is for learning things. Like how to hypnotize a chicken.

The usual subject of language arts in Sharon McCreary's fourth, fifth and sixth grade class at Sands Montessori School took a back seat briefly Thursday to a somewhat reluctant lecture from the vice president of the United States on how to make a chicken sleepy, veeerry sleepy.

Al Gore stopped in Ms. McCreary's classroom as part of a quick tour of the school's crumbling physical structure.

After looking at the peeling paint on the windows, Mr. Gore chatted with students.

Just as Mr. Gore was about to leave, 11-year-old Hessam Akhlaghpour of Clifton piped up to tell the vice president he had heard him talking on CBS' 60 Minutes about how people in his native Tennessee would hypnotize chickens for amusement.

Tell us how to do it, Hessam said. Mr. Gore laughed and started backing toward the door.

No, really, tell us how to do it, Hessam insisted, like a mini-Mike Wallace.

So the vice president, after warning the kids not to try this at home, told them: Hold a chicken's head on the ground. Take a finger or a stick and draw circles around the chicken's head.

He'll try to follow the stick and, in no time, he'll go "cluck, cluck' and he's out, Mr. Gore said.

The only thing more disturbing than an article full of so many logical fallacies and pompous, arrogant gobbledy-gook is the authoress apparently really believes it.

I have to hand it to leftists on one thing, though - they show an astonishing organizational competence with respect to talking points - the same old lies, sometimes recycled but cleverly hidden, always ridiculous but repeated early and often, often enough that people start to believe them. But see above.

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